Man, I had a pretty cool reply worked up for this, but then I talked to our office's resident quantum mechanics expert and my overextension of the metaphor came crashing down.

I learned that the wave equation (Schroedinger equation) of quantum mechanics which resolves the wave-particle duality does not describe the trajectory of a particle's motion, but rather the probability that the particle will be found in a given range of space and time. Of course this lends itself to its own set of metaphor extensions. If the community is like a wave in the quantum mechanical sense, then we don't know with complete certainty where or when we will be; we merely have probability.

The likening of a community to a wave, in the sense that we're fundamentally connected and continuous, probably refers more properly to a mechanical wave, not a quantum one (which I'm told is just a probability function). At any rate, I love the question, Jonathan. I would say that as a wave, we're more like one in a chainlink rather than, say, a rope or pool of water. Links can be removed and reconnected, but one's removal causes profound change in the waveform.

Some equally baffling but beautiful thoughts:

Then take me disappearin' through the smoke rings of my mind,
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves,
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach,
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.
- from "Mr. Tambourine Man"

Thanks, Dan. Actually, the quantum phenomena which introduced the wave/particle dilemma arose because shooting certain "particles" through slits produced "hit patterns" which, for some reason, appeared to follow wave interference rules, even though the particles were not being shot simultaneously, and even though they were being shot in the same direction.

So it's in that sense that I was talking about waves and position in the same breath. You're right though that the Schroedinger equation doesn't talk about waves per se, but a particle's position probability graph. Which, as you said, gives rise to a whole lot of other metaphors!

The likening of a community to a wave is then (according to me, anyway) paradoxical in the same sense that particles which are shot through slits form interference patterns, almost as if they had been connected like with chain links (but we know they're not)! It seems deeply mysterious to me, and that's the aspect I was getting at with my analogy.

Yeah, the slit diffraction pattern experiment is really cool. I think I remember doing it with index cards in my high school physics class. Interesting that Einstein's Nobel prize didn't come from relativity, but the photoelectric effect, which is evidence of light's particle nature, and these paradoxes perplexed even him! Jon, in another life we'd be astronomers/theoretical physicists. That's the life after our rock star life though. Anyway, you're right, the quantum analogy to our community is better, and certainly much cooler, than the chain or rope wave.

Hey, I haven't quite given up on the hope that actually this life is my rock star life! We could still become quantum physicists too. I might be a mathematician first, though.

Loved this post, Jonathan, especially the LAST bit, calling for data from the scientific community at large. I wish I had something tangible to contribute in the way of data... but your post somewhat reminded me of related questions I've had. Here's one: what does one do with people who feel called to be part of a community for a while, but are then called elsewhere? Certainly for the literalists, there is Biblical precedent for such, and it would be ridiculous to claim that God calls each of us to a loving, lifelong, monagamous relationship with a certain, particular community. So when someone says to you, "I feel that God is calling me elsewhere", what can one really say? On the other hand, perhaps it sometimes feels that people aren't really treating the community as something to be committed to longterm, just hopping mindlessly from one community to the next. Does one challenge their ability to hear God's voice? Othertimes I wonder if we should all directly consult the community we're in before moving on?

Sorry for posting to your site from the browser whose name we won't mention; Firefox would've taken a decade to download to my parents' machine over dialup.

Mike, I think you enunciated very well the different tensions between the two disparate modes of representing call in community. Now how about coming up with a better, dual representation? :-)

What do you mean, a better representation than the partice / wave duality? I rather liked that one, inherent difficulties notwithstanding. I'm not sure _any_ metaphor will represent the actual ins and outs of communities much better.

If that's what you mean, though...

I think it's certainly complicated by the fact that sometimes people are doing what God wants and sometimes they're not. Furthermore, I think that is one of the most interesting aspects of the whole mess (and thus not one I would want to leave out of the metaphor), second only to the fact that real personalities are involved who cannot be well described deterministically.

The question I'm asking myself, is what aspects of community life do you want to capture with the metaphor? And is a stochastic-type framework sufficient, in which we can simply observe what happens and propose a model that governs it, or do you want a deterministic-type framework, in which we observe what happens and propose laws that govern things? In other words, does the metaphor have to capture to some extent the actual processes (obedience, disobedience, calling) or is describing what seems to happen suffcicient?